LAUREL-CROWNED LETTERS
CHARLES LAMB
It may well be that the "Essays of Elia" will be found to have kept
their perfume, and the LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB to retain their old
sweet savor, when "Sartor Resartus" has about as many readers as
Bulwer's "Artificial Changeling," and nine tenths even of "Don Juan"
lie darkening under the same deep dust that covers the rarely troubled
pages of the "Secchia Rapita."
A.C. SWINBURNE
No assemblage of letters, parallel or kindred to that in the hands
of the reader, if we consider its width of range, the fruitful period
over which it stretches, and its typical character, has ever been
produced.
W.C. HAZLITT ON LAMB'S LETTERS.
THE BEST LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB
Edited with an Introduction
BY EDWARD GILPIN JOHNSON
A.D. 1892.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LETTER
I. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge
II. To Coleridge
III. To Coleridge
IV. To Coleridge
V. To Coleridge
VI. To Coleridge
VII. To Coleridge
VIII. To Coleridge
IX. To Coleridge
X. To Coleridge
XI. To Coleridge
XII. To Coleridge
XIII. To Coleridge
XIV. To Coleridge
XV. To Robert Southey
XVI. To Southey
XVII. To Southey
XVIII. To Southey
XIX. To Thomas Manning
XX. To Coleridge
XXI. To Manning
XXII. To Coleridge
XXIII. To Manning
XXIV. To Manning
XXV. To Coleridge
XXVI. To Manning
XXVII. To Coleridge
XXVIII. To Coleridge
XXIX. To Manning
XXX. To Manning
XXXI. To Manning
XXXII. To Manning
XXXIII. To Coleridge
XXXIV. To Wordsworth
XXXV. To Wordsworth
XXXVI. To Manning
XXXVII. To Manning
XXXVIII. To Manning
XXXIX. To Coleridge
XL. To Manning
XLI. To Manning
XLII. To Manning
XLIII. To William Godwin
XLIV. To Manning
XLV. To Miss Wordsworth
XLVI. To Manning
XLVII. To Wordsworth
XLVIII. To Manning
XLIX. To Wordsworth
L. To Manning
LI. To Miss Wordsworth
LII. To Wordsworth
LIII. To Wordsworth
LIV. To Wordsworth
LV. To Wordsworth
LVI. To Southey
LVII. To Miss Hutchinson
LVIII. To Manning
LIX. To Manning
LX. To Wordsworth
LXI. To Wordsworth
LXII. To H. Dodwell
LXIII. To Mrs. Wordsworth
LXIV. To Wordsworth
LXV. To Manning
LXVI. To Miss Wordsworth
LXVII. To Coleridge
LXVIII. To Wordsworth
LXIX. To John Clarke
LXX. To Mr. Barren Field
LXXI. To Walter Wilson
LXXII. To Bernard Barton
LXXIII. To Miss Wordsworth
LXXIV. To Mr. and Mrs. Bruton
LXXV. To Bernard Barton
LXXVI. To Miss Hutchinson
LXXVII. To Bernard Barton
LXXVIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
LXXIX. To Bernard Barton
LXXX. To Bernard Barton
LXXXI. To Bernard Barton
LXXXII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIV. To Bernard Barton
LXXXV. To Bernard Barton
LXXXVI. To Wordsworth
LXXXVII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXVIII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIX. To Bernard Barton
XC. To Southey
XCI. To Bernard Barton
XCII. To J.B. Dibdin
XCIII. To Henry Crabb Robinson
XCIV. To Peter George Patmore
XCV. To Bernard Barton
XCVI. To Thomas Hood
XCVII. To P.G. Patmore
XCVIII. To Bernard Barton
XCIX. To Procter
C. To Bernard Barton
CI. To Mr. Gilman
CII. To Wordsworth
CIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
CIV. To George Dyer
CV. To Dyer
CVI. To Mr. Moxon
CVII. To Mr. Moxon
INTRODUCTION.
No writer, perhaps, since the days of Dr. Johnson has been oftener
brought before us in biographies, essays, letters, etc., than Charles
Lamb. His stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs,--"almost immaterial
legs," Hood called them,--his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head
"worthy of Aristotle," his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and,
alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he
owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and
relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to
us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at
No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the
rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated
Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which
posterity peeps in upon the company,--Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry
Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade,
dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny
Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and
Wordsworth,--and sees them discharging the severer offices of the
whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds
over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and
the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the
evening,--"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the
foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably
presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women,"
Mary Lamb.
The _terati_ Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than
their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes," pots of porter,--a noontide meal for a hodman,--and
the hour midnight! One is reminded, _à propos_ of Miss Lamb's robust
viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but
I do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this
matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague
intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The
Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps,
over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons
and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal visions." No wonder!
It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd,
Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering
something new about Charles Lamb. In this quarter, at least, the wind
shall be tempered to the reader,--shorn as he is by these pages of a
charming letter or two. So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme
may fairly be considered exhausted. Numberless writers, too, have rung
the changes upon "poor Charles Lamb," "dear Charles Lamb," "gentle
Charles Lamb," and the rest,--the final epithet, by the way being one
that Elia, living, specially resented:
"For God's sake," he wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any
more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.
It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral
coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such
epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best,
and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is
abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished.
I hope my _virtues_ have done _sucking_. I can scarce think but you
meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe
that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a
cordial to some green-sick sonneteer."
The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb--one of the
most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius--is
absurdly' misplaced.
Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently
essaying to "analyze" and account for Lamb's special zest and flavor, as
though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together
upon principles of clockwork. We are perhaps over-fond of these arid
pastimes nowadays. It is not the "sweet musk-roses," the "apricocks and
dewberries" of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver,
we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our
endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors,
innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we
may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the
Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus.
For such critical chopped-hay--sweeter to the modern taste than honey of
Hybla--Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to
an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon _explaining_
some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, "I am, sir, a matter-of-lie
man." It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses' banquet. Charles Lamb
was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats's, and could
enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, "in the whole _mundus
edibilis_ the most delicate," Roast Pig, for that matter) without
pragmatically asking, as the king did of the apple in the dumpling, "how
the devil it got there." His value as a critic is grounded in this
capacity of _naïve_ enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of
discerning beauty and making _us_ discern it,--thus adding to the known
treasures and pleasures of mankind.
Suggestions not unprofitable for these later days lurk in these traits
of Elia the student and critic. How worthy the imitation, for instance,
of those disciples who band together to treat a fine poem (of Browning,
say, or Shelley) as they might a chapter in the Revelation,--speculating
sagely upon the import of the seven seals and the horns of the great
beast, instead of enjoying the obvious beauties of their author. To the
schoolmaster--whose motto would seem too often to be the counsel of the
irate old lady in Dickens, "Give him a meal of chaff!"--Charles Lamb's
critical methods are rich in suggestion. How many ingenuous boys, lads
in the very flush and hey-day of appreciativeness of the epic virtues,
have been parsed, declined, and conjugated into an utter detestation of
the melodious names of Homer and Virgil! Better far for such victims had
they, instead of aspiring to the vanities of a "classical education,"
sat, like Keats, unlearnedly at the feet of quaint Chapman, or Dryden,
or even of Mr. Pope.
Perhaps, by way of preparative to the reading of Charles Lamb's letters,
it will be well to run over once more the leading facts of his life.
First let us glance at his outward appearance. Fortunately there are a
number of capital pieces of verbal portraiture of Elia.
Referring to the year 1817, "Barry Cornwall" wrote:
"Persons who had been in the habit of traversing Covent
Garden at that time of night, by extending their walk a few
yards into Russell Street have noticed a small, spare man
clothed in black, who went out every morning, and returned
every afternoon as the hands of the clock moved toward
certain hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat
stiff in his manner, and almost clerical in dress, which
indicated much wear. He had a long, melancholy face, with
keen, penetrating eyes; and he walked with a short, resolute
step citywards. He looked no one in the face for more than
a moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on.
No one who ever studied the human features could pass him
by without recollecting his countenance; it was full of
sensibility, and it came upon you like new thought, which you
could not help dwelling upon afterwards: it gave rise to
meditation, and did you good. This small, half-clerical man
was--Charles Lamb."
His countenance is thus described by Thomas Hood:
"His was no common face, none of those willow-pattern
ones which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries,
but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware,--one
to the set; unique, antique, quaint, you might have sworn to
it piecemeal,--a separate affidavit to each feature."
Mrs. Charles Mathews, wife of the comedian, who met Lamb at a dinner,
gives an amusing account of him:--
"Mr. Lamb's first appearance was not prepossessing. His
figure was small and mean, and no man was certainly ever
less beholden to his tailor. His 'bran' new suit of black
cloth (in which he affected several times during the day to
take great pride, and to cherish as a novelty that he had
looked for and wanted) was drolly contrasted with his very
rusty silk stockings, shown from his knees, and his much too
large, thick shoes, without polish. His shirt rejoiced in a wide,
ill-plaited frill, and his very small, tight, white neckcloth was
hemmed to a fine point at the ends that formed part of a little
bow. His hair was black and sleek, but not formal, and
his face the gravest I ever saw, but indicating great intellect,
and resembling very much the portraits of Charles I."
From this sprightly and not too flattering sketch we may turn to
Serjeant Talfourd's tender and charming portrait,--slightly idealized,
no doubt; for the man of the coif held a brief for his friend, and was a
poet besides:--
"Methinks I see him before me now as he appeared then,
and as he continued without any perceptible alteration to me,
during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were
closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed
as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black,
was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most
noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an
expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with
varying expression, though the prevalent expression was
sad; and the nose, slightly curved, and delicately carved at
the nostril, with the lower outline of the face delicately oval,
completed a head which was finely placed upon the shoulders,
and gave importance and even dignity to a diminutive and
shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its
quivering sweetness, and fix it forever in words? There are
none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep
thought, striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed
into cordial mirth, and a smile of painful sweetness, present
an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His
personal appearance and manner are not unjustly characterized
by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning, [1]
'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.'"
The writings of Charles Lamb abound in passages of autobiography. "I was
born," he tells us in that delightful sketch, "The Old Benchers of the
Inner Temple," "and passed the first seven years of my life in the
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I
had almost said,--for in those young years what was this king of rivers
to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are of my
oldest recollections." His father, John Lamb, the "Lovel" of the essay
cited, had come up a little boy from Lincolnshire to enter the service
of Samuel Salt,--one of those "Old Benchers" upon whom the pen of Elia
has shed immortality, a stanch friend and patron to the Lambs, the kind
proprietor of that "spacious closet of good old English reading" upon
whose "fair and wholesome pasturage" Charles and his sister, as
children, "browsed at will."
John Lamb had married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for fifty years
housekeeper at the country-seat of the Plumers, Blakesware, in
Hertfordshire, the "Blakesmoor" of the Essays, frequent scene of Lamb's
childish holiday sports,--a spacious mansion, with its park and terraces
and "firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and day-long murmuring
wood-pigeon;" an Eden it must have seemed to the London-bred child, in
whose fancy the dusty trees and sparrows and smoke-grimed fountain of
Temple Court had been a pastoral. Within the cincture of its excluding
garden-walls, wrote Elia in later years, "I could have exclaimed with
that garden-loving poet, [2]--
"'Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh, so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place:
But lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briers, nail me through.'"
At Blakesware, too, was the room whence the spirit of Sarah Battle--that
"gentlewoman born"--winged its flight to a region where revokes and
"luke-warm gamesters" are unknown.
To John and Elizabeth Lamb were born seven children, only three of whom,
John, Mary, and Charles, survived their infancy. Of the survivors,
Charles was the youngest, John being twelve and Mary ten years his
senior,--a fact to be weighed in estimating the heroism of Lamb's later
life. At the age of seven, Charles Lamb, "son of John Lamb, scrivener,
and Elizabeth, his wife," was entered at the school of Christ's
Hospital,--"the antique foundation of that godly and royal child King
Edward VI." Of his life at this institution he has left us abundant and
charming memorials in the Essays, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital,"
and "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,"--the latter sketch
corrective of the rather optimistic impressions of the former.
With his schoolfellows Charles seems to have been, despite his timid and
retiring disposition (he said of himself, "while the others were all
fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young
monk"), a decided favorite. "Lamb," wrote C. V. Le Grice, a schoolmate
often mentioned in essay and letter, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very
sensible and keenly observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by his
master on account of his infirmity of speech.... I never heard his name
mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no
other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there
was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle
manners excited that kindness."
For us the most important fact of the Christ's Hospital school-days is
the commencement of Lamb's life-long friendship with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, two years his senior, and the object of his fervent
hero-worship. Most of us, perhaps, can find the true source of whatever
of notable good or evil we have effected in life in the moulding
influence of one of these early friendships or admirations. It is the
boy's hero, the one he loves and reverences among his schoolfellows,--
not his taskmaster,--that is his true teacher, the setter of the
broader standards by which he is to abide through life. Happy the man
the feet of whose early idols have not been of clay.
It was under the quickening influence of the eloquent, precocious genius
of the "inspired charity boy" that Charles Lamb's ideals and ambitions
shaped themselves out of the haze of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at
sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of
verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of
his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian,
schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting--and as chimerical--as the
pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger
lad became his ardent disciple.
Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and the
companionship of the two friends was for a time interrupted. To part
with Coleridge, to exchange the ease and congenial scholastic atmosphere
of the Hospital for the _res angusta domi_, for the intellectual
starvation of a life of counting-house drudgery, must have been a bitter
trial for him. But the shadow of poverty was upon the little household
in the Temple; on the horizon of the future the blackening clouds of
anxieties still graver were gathering; and the youngest child was called
home to share the common burden.
Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his
brother John [3]--a cheerful optimist, a _dilettante_ in art, genial,
prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were
concerned an outsider--already held a lucrative post. It was not long
before Charles obtained promotion in the form of a clerkship with the
East India Company,--one of the last kind services of Samuel Salt, who
died in the same year, 1792,--and with the East India Company he
remained for the rest of his working life.
Upon the death of their generous patron the Lambs removed from the
Temple and took lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn; and for
Charles the battle of life may be said to have fairly begun. His work as
a junior clerk absorbed, of course, the greater part of his day and of
his year. Yet there were breathing-spaces: there were the long evenings
with the poets; with Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and
Cowley,--"the sweetest names, which carry a perfume in the mention;"
there were the visits to the play, the yearly vacation jaunts to sunny
Hertfordshire. The intercourse with Coleridge, too, was now occasionally
renewed. The latter had gone up to Cambridge early in 1791, there to
remain--except the period of his six months' dragooning--for the nest
four years. During his visits to London it was the habit of the two
schoolfellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the "Salutation and
Cat" to discuss the topics dear to both: and it was about this time that
Lamb's sonnet to Mrs Siddons, his first appearance in print, was
published in the "Morning Chronicle."
The year 1796 was a terribly eventful one for the Lambs. There was a
taint of insanity in the family on the father's side, and on May 27,
1796, we find Charles writing to Coleridge these sad words,--doubly sad
for the ring of mockery in them:--
"My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very
humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at
Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now and don't bite
any one. But mad I was!" [4]
Charles, thanks to the resolution with which he combated the tendency,
and to the steadying influence of his work at the desk,--despite his
occasional murmurs, his best friend and sheet-anchor in life,--never
again succumbed to the family malady; but from that moment, over his
small household, Madness--like Death in Milton's vision--continually
"shook its dart," and at best only "delayed to strike." [5]
It was in the September of 1796 that the calamity befell which has
tinged the story of Charles and Mary Lamb with the sombrest hues of the
Greek tragedy. The family were still in the Holborn lodgings,--the
mother an invalid, the father sinking into a second childhood. Mary, in
addition to the burden of ministering to her parents, was working for
their support with her needle.
At this point it will be well to insert a prefatory word or two as to
the character of Mary Lamb; and here the witnesses are in accord. There
is no jarring of opinion, as in her brother's case; for Charles Lamb has
been sorely misjudged,--often, it must be admitted, with ground of
reason; sometimes by persons who might and should have looked deeper. In
a notable instance, the heroism of his life has been meanly overlooked
by one who preached to mankind with the eloquence of the Prophets the
prime need and virtue of recognizing the hero. If self-abnegation lies
at the root of true heroism, Charles Lamb--that "sorry phenomenon" with
an "insuperable proclivity to gin" [6]--was a greater hero than was
covered by the shield of Achilles. The character of Mary Lamb is quickly
summed Up. She was one of the most womanly of women. "In all its
essential sweetness," says Talfourd, "her character was like her
brother's; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more
serene, she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him, and to
protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity, from the depths of
which she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend in any
difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of
consolers." Hazlitt said that "he never met with a woman who could
reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable,--Mary Lamb."
The writings of Elia are strewn, as we know, with the tenderest tributes
to her worth. "I wish," he says, "that I could throw into a heap the
remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal
division."
The psychology of madness is a most subtle inquiry. How slight the
mysterious touch that throws the smooth-running human mechanism into a
chaos of jarring elements, that transforms, in the turn of an eyelash,
the mild humanity of the gentlest of beings into the unreasoning
ferocity of the tiger.
The London "Times" of September 26, 1796, contained the following
paragraph:--
"On Friday afternoon the coroner and a jury sat on the
body of a lady in the neighborhood of Holborn, who died in
consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.
It appeared by the evidence adduced that while the family
were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife
lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little
girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her
infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and
with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her
cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too
late. [7] The dreadful scene presented him the mother lifeless,
pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing
over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father,
weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from
the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks
she had been madly hurling about the room.
"For a few days prior to this, the family had observed
some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased
on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next
morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at
home.
"The jury of course brought in their verdict,--_Lunacy_."
I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing
scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the
victim of her frenzy was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Andrew's,
Holborn. It became necessary for Charles and his father to make an
immediate change of residence, and they took lodgings at Pentonville.
There is a pregnant sentence in one of Lamb's letters that flashes with
the vividness of lightning into the darkest recesses of those early
troubles and embarrassments. "We are," he wrote to Coleridge, "_in a
manner marked_."
Charles Lamb after some weeks obtained the release of his sister from
the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship,--a
charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a
steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the
crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even
than that of his genius about the figure--it was "small and mean," said
sprightly Mrs. Mathews--of the India House clerk.
As already stated, the mania that had once attacked Charles never
returned; but from the side of Mary Lamb this grimmest of spectres never
departed. "Mary A is again _from home_;" "Mary is _fallen ill_ again:"
how often do such tear-fraught phrases--tenderly veiled, lest! some
chance might bring them to the eye of the blameless sufferer--recur in
the Letters! Brother and sister were ever on the watch for the symptoms
premonitory of the return of this "their sorrow's crown of sorrows."
Upon their little holiday excursions, says Talfourd, a strait-waistcoat,
carefully packed by Miss Lamb herself, was their constant companion.
Charles Lloyd relates that he once met them slowly pacing together a
little footpath in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly, and found on
joining them that they were taking their solemn way to the old asylum.
Thus, upon this guiltless pair were visited the sins of their fathers.
With the tragical events just narrated, the storm of calamity seemed to
have spent its force, and there were thenceforth plenty of days of calm
and of sunshine for Charles Lamb. The stress of poverty was lightened
and finally removed by successive increases of salary at the India
House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the
world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends--Southey,
Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest--more congenial, and
certainly more profitable, than the vagrant _intimados_, "to the world's
eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure in
the early Temple days.
Lamb's earliest avowed appearance as an author was in Coleridge's first
volume of poems, published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. "The
effusions signed C.L.," says Coleridge in the preface, "were written by
Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. Independently of the signature,
their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." The
"effusions" were four sonnets, two of them--the most noteworthy--
touching upon the one love-romance of Lamb's life, [9]--his early
attachment to the "fair-haired" Hertfordshire girl, the "Anna" of the
Sonnets, the "Alice W---n" of the Essays. We remember that Ella in
describing the gallery of old family portraits, in the essay,
"Blakesmoor in H---shire," dwells upon "that beauty with the cool, blue,
pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with
the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, _so like my Alice_."
In 1797 Cottle issued a second edition of Coleridge's poems, this time
with eleven additional pieces by Lamb,--making fifteen of his in
all,--and containing verses by their friend Charles Lloyd. "It is
unlikely," observes Canon Ainger, "that this little venture brought any
profit to its authors, or that a subsequent volume of blank verse by
Lamb and Lloyd in the following year proved more remunerative." In 1798
Lamb, anxious for his sister's sake to add to his slender income,
composed his "miniature romance," as Talfourd calls it, "Rosamund Gray;"
and this little volume, which has not yet lost its charm, proved a
moderate success. Shelley, writing from Italy to Leigh Hunt in 1819,
said of it: "What a lovely thing is his 'Rosamund Gray'! How much
knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it! When I
think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see how unnoticed remain things
of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I hope for myself
if I had not higher objects in view than fame?"
It is rather unpleasant, in view of this generous--if overstrained--
tribute, to find the object of it referring later to the works of his
encomiast as "thin sown with profit or delight." [10]
In 1802 Lamb published in a small duodecimo his blank-verse tragedy,
"John Woodvil,"--it had previously been declined by John Kemble as
unsuited to the stage,--and in 1806 was produced at the Drury Lane
Theatre his farce "Mr. H.," the summary failure of which is chronicled
with much humor in the Letters. [11]
The "Tales from Shakspeare," by Charles and Mary Lamb, were published by
Godwin in 1807, and a second edition was called for in the following
year. Lamb was now getting on surer--and more remunerative--ground; and
in 1808 he prepared for the firm of Longmans his masterly "Specimens of
the English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakspeare." Concerning
this work he wrote to Manning:--
"Specimens are becoming fashionable. We have Specimens
of Ancient English Poets, Specimens of Modern English
Poets, Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,
without end. They used to be called 'Beauties.' You have
seen Beauties of Shakspeare? so have many people that
never saw any beauties _in_ Shakspeare,"
From Charles Lamb's "Specimens" dates, as we know, the revival of the
study of the old English dramatists other than Shakespeare. He was the
first to call attention to the neglected beauties of those great
Elizabethans, Webster, Marlowe, Ford, Dekker, Massinger,--no longer
accounted mere "mushrooms that sprang up in a ring under the great oak
of Arden." [12]
The opportunity that was to call forth Lamb's special faculty in
authorship came late in life. In January, 1820, Baldwin, Cradock, and
Joy, the publishers, brought out the first number of a new monthly
journal under the name of an earlier and extinct periodical, the "London
Magazine," and in the August number appeared an article, "Recollections
of the South Sea House." over the signature _Elia_. [13] With this
delightful sketch the essayist Elia may be said to have been born. In
none of Lamb's previous writings had there been, more than a hint of
that unique vein,--wise, playful, tender, fantastic, "everything by
starts, and nothing long," exhibited with a felicity of phrase certainly
unexcelled in English prose literature,--that we associate with his
name. The careful reader of the Letters cannot fail to note that it is
_there_ that Lamb's peculiar quality in authorship is first manifest.
There is a letter to Southey, written as early as 1798, that has the
true Elia ring. [14] With the "London Magazine," which was
discontinued in 1826.
Elia was born, and with it he may be said to have died,--although some
of his later contributions to the "New Monthly" [15] and to the
"Englishman's Magazine" were included in the "Last Essays of Elia,"
collected and published in 1833. The first series of Lamb's essays under
the title of Elia had been published in a single volume by Taylor and
Hessey, of the "London Magazine," in 1823.
The story of Lamb's working life--latterly an uneventful one, broken
chiefly by changes of abode and by the yearly holiday jaunts,
"migrations from the blue bed to the brown"--from 1796, when the
correspondence with Coleridge begins, is told in the letters. For
thirty-three years he served the East India Company, and he served it
faithfully and steadily. There is, indeed, a tradition that having been
reproved on one occasion for coming to the office late in the morning,
he pleaded that he always left it "so very early in the evening." Poets,
we know, often "heard the chimes at midnight" in Elia's day, and the
plea has certainly a most Lamb-like ring. That the Company's directors,
however, were more than content with the service of their literate
clerk, the sequel shows.
It is manifest in certain letters, written toward the close of 1824 and
in the beginning of 1825, that Lamb's confinement was at last telling
upon him, and that he was thinking of a release from his bondage to the
"desk's dead wood." In February, 1825, he wrote to Barton,--
"Your gentleman brother sets my mouth watering after
liberty. Oh that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with
every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The
birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How
I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and
ramble about purposeless as an idiot!"
Later in March we learn that he had signified to the directors his
willingness to resign,
"I am sick of hope deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation
that is to turn up my fortune; but round it rolls,
and will turn up nothing, I have a glimpse of freedom, of
becoming a gentleman at large, but I am put off from day
to day. I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted
nor rejected. Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful
suspense. Guess what an absorbing state I feel it. I am
not conscious of the existence of friends, present or absent.
The East India directors alone can be that thing to me. I
have just learned that nothing will be decided this week.
Why the next? Why any week?"
But the "grand wheel" was really turning, to some purpose, and a few
days later, April 6, 1825, he joyfully wrote to Barton,--
"My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my
recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand,
much more mind, to compose a letter, I am free, B.B.,--free
as air!
"'The little bird that wings the sky
Knows no such liberty,'
I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I
came home forever!"
The quality of the generosity of the East India directors was not
strained in Lamb's case. It should be recorded as an agreeable
commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in "a
business matter,"--words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic
matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and
man,--were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles
and Mary Lamb--already beset with anxieties grave enoughthey removed
forever the shadow of want. Lamb's salary at the time of his retirement
was nearly seven hundred pounds a year, and the offer made to him was a
pension of four hundred and fifty, with a deduction of nine pounds a
year for his sister, should she survive him.
Lamb lived to enjoy his freedom and the Company's bounty nearly nine
years. Soon after his retirement he settled with his sister at Enfield,
within easy reach of his loved London, removing thence to the
neighboring parish of Edmonton,--his last change of residence.
Coleridge's death, in July, 1834, was a heavy blow to him. "When I heard
of the death of Coleridge," he wrote, "it was without grief. It seemed
to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he
had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve; but
since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit
haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or
books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the
proof and touchstone of all my cogitations." Lamb did not long outlive
his old schoolfellow. Walking in the middle of December along the London
road, he stumbled and fell, inflicting a slight wound upon his face. The
injury at first seemed trivial; but soon after, erysipelas appearing, it
became evident that his general health was too feeble to resist. On the
27th of December, 1834, he passed quietly away, whispering in his last
moments the names of his dearest friends.
Mary Lamb survived her brother nearly thirteen years, dying, at the
advanced age of eighty-two, on May 20, 1847. With increasing years her
attacks had become more frequent and of longer duration, till her mind
became permanently weakened. After leaving Edmonton, she lived chiefly
in a pleasant house in St. John's Wood, surrounded by old books and
prints, under the care of a nurse. Her pension, together with the income
from her brother's savings, was amply sufficient for her support.
Talfourd, who was present at the burial of Mary Lamb, has eloquently
described the earthly reunion of the brother and sister:--
"A few survivors of the old circle, then sadly thinned, attended her
remains to the spot in Edmnonton churchyard where they were laid above
those of her brother. In accordance with Lamb's own feeling, so far as
it could be gathered from his expressions on a subject to which he did
not often or willingly refer, he had been interred in a deep grave,
simply dug and wattled round, but without any affectation of stone or
brickwork to keep the human dust from its kindred earth. So dry,
however, is the soil of the quiet churchyard that the excavated earth
left perfect walls of stiff clay, and permitted us just to catch a
glimpse of the still untarnished edges of the coffin, in which all the
mortal part of one of the most delightful persons who ever lived was
contained, and on which the remains of her he had loved with love
'passing the love of woman' were henceforth to rest,--the last glances
we shall ever have even of that covering,--concealed from us as we
parted by the coffin of the sister. We felt, I believe, after a moment's
strange shuddering, that the reunion was well accomplished; although the
true-hearted son of Admiral Burney, who had known and loved the pair we
quitted from a child, and who had been among the dearest objects of
existence to him, refused to be comforted."
There are certain handy phrases, the legal-tender of conversation, that
people generally use without troubling themselves to look into their
title to currency. It is often said, for instance, with an air of
deploring a phase of general mental degeneracy, that "letter-writing is
a lost art." And so it is,---not because men nowadays, if they were put
to it, could not, on the average, write as good letters as ever (the
average although we certainly have no Lambs, and perhaps no Walpoles or
Southeys to raise it, would probably be higher), but because the
conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely
passed away. With our modern facility of communication, the letter has
lost the pristine dignity of its function. The earth has dwindled
strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation
used to Mr. Edison's devices, Puck's girdle presents no difficulties to
the imagination. In Charles Lamb's time the expression "from Land's End
to John O'Groat's" meant something; to-day it means a few comfortable
hours by rail, a few minutes by telegraph. Wordsworth in the North of
England was to Lamb, so far as the chance of personal contact was
concerned, nearly as remote as Manning in China. Under such conditions a
letter was of course a weighty matter; it was a thoughtful summary of
opinion, a rarely recurring budget of general intelligence, expensive to
send, and paid for by the recipient; and men put their minds and
energies into composing it. "One wrote at that time," says W.C. Hazlitt,
"a letter to an acquaintance in one of the home counties which one would
only write nowadays to a settler in the Colonies or a relative
in India."
But to whatever conditions or circumstances we may owe the existence of
Charles Lamb's letters, their quality is of course the fruit of the
genius and temperament of the writer. Unpremeditated as the strain of
the skylark, they have almost to excess (were that possible) the prime
epistolary merit of spontaneity. From the brain of the writer to the
sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream. Lamb, at his best,
ranges with Shakspearian facility the gamut of human emotion,
exclaiming, as it were at one moment, with Jaques, "Motley's the only
wear!"--in the next probing the source of tears. He is as ejaculatory
with his pen as other men are with their tongues. Puns, quotations,
conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness,
chase each other over his pages like clouds over a summer sky; and the
whole is leavened with the sterling ethical and aesthetic good sense
that renders Charles Lamb one of the wholesomest of writers.
As to the plan on which the selections for this volume have been made,
it needs only to be said that, in general, the editor has aimed to
include those letters which exhibit most fully the writer's distinctive
charm and quality. This plan leaves, of course, a residue of
considerable biographical and critical value; but it is believed that to
all who really love and appreciate him, Charles Lamb's "Best Letters"
are those which are most uniquely and unmistakably Charles Lamb's.
E. G. J. _September_, 1891.
[1] Letter L.
[2] Cowley.
[3] The James Elia of the essay "My Relations."
[4] Letter I.
[5] Talfourd's Memoir.
[6] Carlyle.
[7] It would seem from Lamb's letter to Coleridge (Letter IV.) that it
was _he_, not the landlord, who appeared thus too late, and who snatched
the knife from the unconscious hand.
[8] The reader is referred to Lamb's beautiful essay, "Dream Children."
[9] If we except his passing tenderness for the young Quakeress, Hester
Savory, Lamb admitted that he had never spoken to the lady in his life.
[10] Letter LXXXIII.
[11] Letters LXV IL., LXVIII., LXIX.
[12] W. S. Landor.
[13] In assuming this pseudonym Lamb borrowed the name of a fellow-clerk
who had served with him thirty years before in the South Sea House,--an
Italian named Elia. The name has probably never been pronounced as Lamb
intended. "_Call him Ellia_," he said in a letter to J. Taylor,
concerning this old acquaintance.
[14] Letter XVII.
[15] The rather unimportant series, "Popular Fallacies," appeared in the
"New Monthly."
[16] In the essay "The Superannuated Man" Lamb describes, with
certain changes and modifications, his retirement from the India House.
I.
TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
_May_ 27, 1796.
Dear Coleridge,--Make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill
when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and am so still to all
the purposes of a single life; so give yourself no further concern about
it. The money would be superfluous to me if I had it.
When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor, Milton, and publishes
his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em; a guinea a book is somewhat
exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the work. The
extracts from it in the "Monthly Review," and the short passages in your
"Watchman," seem to me much superior to anything in his partnership
account with Lovell. [1] Your poems I shall procure forthwith.
There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your numbers from
"Religious Musings," but I thought them elaborate. I am somewhat glad
you have given up that paper; it must have been dry, unprofitable, and
of dissonant mood to your disposition. I wish you success in all your
undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the "Evidences
of Religion." There is need of multiplying such books a hundred-fold in
this philosophical age, to _prevent_ converts to atheism, for they seem
too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards....
Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at
Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks
that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent
very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now,
and don't bite any one. But mad I was and many a vagary my imagination
played with me,--enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I
have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day
communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I
finish, I publish. White [2] is on the eve of publishing (he took the
hint from Vortigern) "Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow," etc.; a
copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the
best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards
for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost
as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.
The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry; but you will be curious
to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of
my lucid intervals.
TO MY SISTER.
If from my lips some angry accents fell,
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,
'T was but the error of a sickly mind
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well
And waters clear of Reason; and for me
Let this my verse the poor atonement be,--
My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined
Too highly, and with partial eye to see
No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to Cottle,
I conclude.
Yours sincerely,
LAMB.
[1] Southey had just published his "Joan of Arc," in quarto. He and
Lovell had published jointly, two years before, "Poems by Bion and
Moschus."
[2] A Christ's Hospital schoolfellow, the "Jem" White of the Elia essay,
"The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers."
II.
TO COLERIDGE.
(_No month_) 1796.
_Tuesday night_.--Of your "Watchman," the review of Burke was the best
prose. I augured great things from the first number. There is some
exquisite poetry interspersed. I have re-read the extract from the
"Religious Musings," and retract whatever invidious there was in my
censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one is not in a
disposition thoroughly to relish good writing. I have re-read it in a
more favorable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If
there be anything in it approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to
infer; by "elaborate" I meant simply "labored"), it is the gigantic
hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society: "snakes,
lions, hyenas, and behemoths," is carrying your resentment beyond
bounds. The pictures of "The Simoom," of "Frenzy and Ruin," of "The
Whore of Babylon," and "The Cry of Foul Spirits disinherited of Earth,"
and "The Strange Beatitude" which the good man shall recognize in
heaven, as well as the particularizing of the children of wretchedness
(I have unconsciously included every part of it), form a variety of
uniform excellence. I hunger and thirst to read the poem complete. That
is a capital line in your sixth number,--
"This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month."